Two lines of inquiry were followed to determine how the cerebral cortex and its efferent regions control eye movements and visuospatial attention. Single neuron recording was used to probe the role of the monkey cerebral cortex in the generation of saccadic eye movements. The antisaccade task is a clinically useful task. This this task is subjects are required to make a rapid gaze shift, or saccade, away from a visual stimulus. Patients with frontal deficits are known to have difficulty with the task, making a saccade to the stimulus rather than away from it. Neurons in the lateral intraparietal area of the monkey brain, an area though to be important in the generation of visual attention and the selection of targets for saccadic eye movements were studied while monkeys performed this task. Over 95% of the neurons described the stimulus at its appearance, regardless of whether the monkey was going to make a saccade towards or away from the stimulus. Most neurons continued to describe the stimulus ar the time of the eye movement, regardless of the actual saccade direction. Some neurons that described the cue in the antisaccade task also described the saccade direction. Since the stimulus response overwhelms the saccadic response, these results explain why patients who have functioning parietal cortices but impaired frontal cortices respond to the stimulus (the parietal message) rather tham wait tp generate the saccade (normally the frontal message.)Both frontal and parietal cortices project to the superior colliculus, where neurons discharge before saccades in a manner consistent with their driving the eye movement. Saccades to visual targets are usually more accurate and have greater velocity than saccades to the location of remembered flashes, or antisaccades. The contribution of the visual stimulus to the collicular presaccadic burst was studied in awake monkeys using a number of tasks that included visually guided saccades and tasks that separated the saccade targeting cue from the saccade itself either temporally or spatially. There was a monotonic decrease in presaccadic activity as a function of the delay between the stimulus and the saccade, and antisaccades were associated with the weakest presaccadic bursts. These data suggest that the increase in accuracy and velocity of visually guided saccades as compared with memory guided saccades are related to the difference in activity in the collicular burst neurons among the same tasks. - Cerebral cortex, visuospatial attention, eye movements superior colliculus